Summary- National Reading Panel (USA)

Executive Summary
D e v e l o p i n g E a r l y L i t e r a c y: R e p o r t o f t h e N at i o n a l E a r l y L i t e r a c y P a n e l

A Scientific Synthesis of

Early Literacy Development

and Implications for Intervention

Executive Summary
o f t h e r e p o r t o f t h e n at i o n a l e a r ly l i t e r a c y pa n e l

Christopher J. Lonigan
Florida State University

Timothy Shanahan
University of Illinois at Chicago

The National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that 37 percent of U.S. fourth graders
fail to achieve basic levels of reading achievement. The incidence of reading failure is even higher
within low-income families, ethnic minority groups, and English-language learners. Large-scale
studies have shown that young children—those entering kindergarten and first grade—vary
greatly in their attainment of the early precursor skills that provide the launching pad for later
literacy learning (West, Denton, & Germino-Hausken, 2000; West, Denton, & Reaney, 2000).
What can be done in U.S. homes, preschools, and kindergartens to better prepare children to
succeed in learning to read and write?

In 1997, the U.S. Congress asked that a review of research be conducted to determine what
could be done to improve reading and writing achievement. The resulting Report of the National
Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (NICHD, 2000) has been influential in helping to
guide reading-education policy and practice in the United States. However, that report did not
examine the implications of instructional practices used with children from birth through age
5. To address this gap in the knowledge base, the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) was
convened. The panel was asked to apply a similar methodological review process to that used by
the National Reading Panel (NRP) to issues of instructional practices for young children so that
parents and teachers could better support their emerging literacy skills.

NELP was appointed in 2002 and carried out its work under the auspices of the National Center for
Family Literacy (NCFL). Laura Westberg, director of special projects and research at NCFL directed
the effort. The National Institute for Literacy (NIFL) funded the panel’s work in consultation with
the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the U.S. Department
of Education, and the Office of Head Start in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The panel included the following experts in literacy and early childhood education:

ɶ Anne Cunningham, University of California, Berkeley
ɶ Kathy Escamilla, University of Colorado at Boulder
ɶ Janet Fischel, State University of New York at Stony Brook

executive summary | developing early literacy: report of the national early literacy panel 1

ɶ Susan H. Landry, University of Texas–Houston
ɶ Christopher J. Lonigan, Florida State University
ɶ Victoria Molfese, University of Louisville
ɶ Chris Schatschneider, Florida State University
ɶ Timothy Shanahan, NELP chair, University of Illinois at Chicago
ɶ Dorothy Strickland, Rutgers University.

Questions Addressed by the National Early Literacy Panel
NELP’s primary goal was to identify interventions, parenting activities, and instructional
practices that promote the development of children’s early literacy skills. Toward that end, the
panel posed the following four questions:

1. What are the skills and abilities of young children (age birth through five years or
kindergarten) that predict later reading, writing, or spelling outcomes?

2. Which programs, interventions, and other instructional approaches or procedures have
contributed to or inhibited gains in children’s skills and abilities that are linked to later
outcomes in reading, writing, or spelling?

3. What environments and settings have contributed to or inhibited gains in children’s skills
and abilities that are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing, or spelling?

4. What child characteristics have contributed to or inhibited gains in children’s skills and
abilities that are linked to later outcomes in reading, writing, or spelling?

NELP adopted a methodology that allowed for the identification and selection of published
studies relevant to the panel’s questions, a coding system that allowed for the combination and
comparison of studies, and an appropriate method of statistical analysis. Electronic searches
were conducted using PsycINFO and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC),
and these were supplemented with hand searches of major research journals, reference checks of
past literature reviews, and nominations from leading experts in the field of early literacy. These
search procedures yielded more than 8,000 potential articles that were screened to determine their
relevance to the research questions and their consistency with all selection criteria established by
the panel. This led to the identification of approximately 500 research articles that were used in
the meta-analyses conducted by the panel. The meta-analyses summarized both correlational data
showing the relationships between children’s early abilities and skills and later literacy development
and experimental data that showed the impact of instructional interventions on children’s learning.

Key Findings of the National Early Literacy Panel

Identification of the Domain of Early Literacy Skills
The panel set out first to establish which early skills or abilities could properly be said to
be the precursors of later literacy achievement. This was important because, without such

2 executive summary | developing early literacy: report of the national early literacy panel

a determination, it would be impossible to ascertain what programs or practices were most
effective, because, even in the best of circumstances, most young children develop few
conventional literacy skills before starting school. To identify the essential early skills or abilities
relevant to later literacy development, the panel searched for published scientific studies that
could provide correlational evidence showing the relationship between early skill attainment and
later literacy growth in decoding, reading comprehension, or spelling.

Conventional literacy skills refers to such skills as decoding, oral reading fluency, reading
comprehension, writing, and spelling. The use of these skills is evident within all literacy
practices, and they are readily recognizable as being necessary or useful components of literacy.
The term conventional literacy skills is not widely used in the field but is adopted here to
distinguish between these aspects of literacy that are clearly the focus of the reading, writing,
and spelling instruction provided to elementary and secondary students and those earlier-
developing precursor skills that may not themselves be used within literacy practice but that
may presage the development of conventional literacy skills. Conventional skills can be thought
of as being more sophisticated, mature, or later-developing manifestations of reading and
writing, and they are to be contrasted with precursor, predictive, foundational, or emergent skills
(all terms used in this report). The report sometimes uses, more generally, early literacy skills,
which can refer to both precursor skills and the conventional literacy skills of preschool and
kindergarten children.

Conventional reading and writing skills that are developed in the years from birth to age 5 have
a clear and consistently strong relationship with later conventional literacy skills. Additionally,
six variables representing early literacy skills or precursor literacy skills had medium to large
predictive relationships with later measures of literacy development. These six variables not only
correlated with later literacy as shown by data drawn from multiple studies with large numbers of
children but also maintained their predictive power even when the role of other variables, such as
IQ or socioeconomic status (SES), were accounted for. These six variables include

• alphabet knowledge (AK): knowledge of the names and sounds associated with
printed letters

• phonological awareness (PA): the ability to detect, manipulate, or analyze the auditory
aspects of spoken language (including the ability to distinguish or segment words,
syllables, or phonemes), independent of meaning

• rapid automatic naming (RAN) of letters or digits: the ability to rapidly name a sequence
of random letters or digits

• RAN of objects or colors: the ability to rapidly name a sequence of repeating random
sets of pictures of objects (e.g., “car,” “tree,” “house,” “man”) or colors

• writing or writing name: the ability to write letters in isolation on request or to write
one’s own name

• phonological memory: the ability to remember spoken information for a short period
of time.


An additional five early literacy skills were also moderately correlated with at least one measure
of later literacy achievement but either did not maintain this predictive power when other
important contextual variables were accounted for or have not yet been evaluated by researchers
in this way. These additionally potentially important variables include

• concepts about print: knowledge of print conventions (e.g., left–right, front–back) and
concepts (book cover, author, text)

• print knowledge: a combination of elements of AK, concepts about print, and
early decoding

• reading readiness: usually a combination of AK, concepts of print, vocabulary, memory,
and PA

• oral language: the ability to produce or comprehend spoken language, including
vocabulary and grammar

• visual processing: the ability to match or discriminate visually presented symbols.

These 11 variables consistently predicted later literacy achievement for both preschoolers
and kindergartners. Not surprisingly, these measures were usually more predictive of literacy
achievement at the end of kindergarten or beginning of first grade than of later literacy growth.
The report provides an analysis of the particular relations among these variables. For instance,
oral language was found to play a bigger role in later literacy achievement when it was measured
using more complex measures that included grammar, the ability to define words, and listening
comprehension than when measured using only simple vocabulary knowledge. Also, children’s
early PA—that is, their ability to distinguish among sounds within auditory language—was found
to be an important predictor of later literacy achievement, expanding on earlier NRP findings.

Instructional Practices That Enhance Early Literacy Skills

The panel also set out to identify studies that employed experimental or quasiexperimental
methods to determine the effectiveness of instructional strategies, programs, or practices in
imparting conventional literacy skills or any of these precursor skills to young children. The
panel did not set out to find evaluations of previously identified programs or interventions but
searched for all such studies that had been published in refereed journals in the English language.
The panelists then grouped the identified studies into five analytical categories. The categories of
intervention and the number of studies within each category included the following:

• Code-focused interventions (n = 78): Interventions designed to teach children skills
related to cracking the alphabetic code. Most code-focused interventions included
PA instruction.

• Shared-reading interventions (n = 19): Interventions involving reading books to children.
These interventions included studies of simple shared reading and those that encouraged
various forms of reader-child interactions around the material being read.


• Parent and home programs (n = 32): Interventions using parents as agents of
intervention. These interventions may have involved teaching parents instructional
techniques to use with their children at home to stimulate children’s linguistic or
cognitive development.

• Preschool and kindergarten programs (n = 33): Studies evaluating any aspect of a
preschool or kindergarten program. Ten studies in this category concerned one particular
intervention (the Abecedarian Project). Other studies evaluated effects of educational
programs, curricula, or policies, such as extended-year experience, on kindergartners.

• Language-enhancement interventions (n = 28): Studies examining the effectiveness of an
instructional effort aimed at improving young children’s language development.

The code-focused instructional efforts reported statistically significant and moderate to
large effects across a broad spectrum of early literacy outcomes. Code-focused interventions
consistently demonstrated positive effects directly on children’s conventional literacy skills. Book-
sharing interventions produced statistically significant and moderate-sized effects on children’s
print knowledge and oral language skills, and the home and parent programs yielded statistically
significant and moderate to large effects on children’s oral language skills and general cognitive
abilities. Studies of preschool and kindergarten programs produced significant and moderate to
large effects on spelling and reading readiness. Finally, language-enhancement interventions were
successful at increasing children’s oral language skills to a large and statistically significant degree.
Together, these findings suggest that there are many things that parents and preschools can do to
improve the literacy development of their young children and that different approaches influence
the development of a different pattern of essential skills.

There is great interest in the idea of providing age-appropriate interventions. However, there were
few important differences among these categories of study with regard to age; one important
exception was in the area of language interventions, which showed greater effectiveness early
on. Otherwise, when age-level comparisons were possible, the large and significant effects of
the various interventions were obtained with groups of both younger and older children. This
means that most of the types of instruction that are effective in kindergarten are very similar
to those that can be used in preschool. Unfortunately, there have not been direct tests of age
differentiation in early literacy instruction across kindergarten and preschool, and there are
still too few studies of preschool literacy instruction to provide comparison results that can be
embraced with a high degree of certainty. Future research into this issue could shed greater light
on what, to some observers, may seem a surprising finding.

Few interventions improved conventional literacy skills or the precursor skills most related
to later literacy growth, the exception being code-focused interventions. One reason so few
interventions were found to foster improvement in these measures is that few intervention studies
with young children included measures of such outcomes. Generally, code-focused intervention
studies included such measures, while studies of other instructional approaches did not. It is
possible that some of these other approaches may also be effective in improving early literacy
skills, but that can only be determined through studies employing such measures. Code-focused
programs, book sharing, programs for parents to use at home, and language-enhancement
instruction all improved children’s oral language skills.


The panel wanted to determine whether any child characteristics influenced the effectiveness of
the instructional interventions. In most cases, the panel could not determine the role of children’s
characteristics because of reporting limitations in the original studies. In general, however,
variables, such as age, SES, and race, did not seem to alter the effectiveness of the various
interventions, and it will take future research to determine whether certain interventions would
be effective with particular groups of children.

It should be noted that the interventions that produced large and positive effects on children’s
code-related skills and conventional literacy skills were usually conducted as one-on-one or
small-group instructional activities. These activities tended to be teacher-directed and focused on
helping children learn skills by engaging in the use of those skills. Almost all of the code-focused
interventions included some form of PA intervention. These PA activities generally required
children to detect or manipulate (e.g., delete or blend) small units of sounds in words. Few of the
interventions used rhyming activities as the primary teaching approach. Teaching children about
the alphabet (e.g., letter names or letter sounds) or simple phonics tasks (e.g., blending letter
sounds to make words) seemed to enhance the effects of PA training.

Limitations
The major limitation confronting any meta-analysis is the quality of the original studies that
are being combined. All studies have varying degrees of weakness in their implementation and
reporting. A basic premise of meta-analysis is that all studies on a particular issue would be
unlikely to suffer the same problems and that the influence that such factors may have on results
can therefore be analyzed and understood. The reality is that the various study-design features,
demographic characteristics of participating children, and crucial elements of the educational
environments are hopelessly confounded across studies. Therefore, meta-analysis provides clues to
what might be influencing the effectiveness of an intervention but cannot provide the final word
on such findings.

It is impossible to be certain that any meta-analysis will identify all studies on a particular topic,
and any study that is not included could provide information that would be at odds with the
conclusions drawn. In this case, because the meta-analysis examined only the results of published
studies, it is possible that a somewhat different picture could be derived if a broader net were cast.

In this case, many substantive issues of great concern to educators and parents could not even
be explored adequately because of limitations in the reporting of original studies. There are
many theories, both naïve and scientific, suggesting the likelihood of individual differences in
instructional effectiveness that demographic characteristics might mitigate. This meta-analysis
evaluated whether such variables as race or SES mitigated or moderated the effectiveness of the
various interventions. Unfortunately, it was all too rare that the original studies had provided
sufficient data to allow for unambiguous conclusions to be drawn.

Future Research Directions
The NELP report provides a rich set of findings about the relationship between early developing
child skills and later literacy attainment and the effectiveness of interventions for helping young


children to progress toward successful literacy learning. The analyses carried out by the panel also
reveal important gaps in the empirical research record that future research should address.

The panel identified which early measures of children’s skills were predictive of later decoding,
reading comprehension, and spelling achievement. Some of these variables—certain aspects
of phonological processing, for example—have been shown in previous research to be causally
connected to literacy achievement (i.e., if those skills are taught, children attain higher levels of
literacy), but this is not true for all of these variables. Future research must determine whether
enhanced early instruction aimed at improving skills, such as AK, concepts of print, or oral
language development, would consistently lead to higher later attainments in literacy.

The panel identified a wide variety of interventions that improved children’s early literacy skills,
and one pattern that emerged was that the various categories of interventions had qualitatively
different outcomes. For example, the code-oriented interventions improved children’s knowledge
of phonology and print conventions, whereas shared-book interventions enhanced children’s
language development. It is possible that some of these interventions would actually have
a wider impact than what was determined here, but that will require that future studies of
such interventions employ a wider range of outcome measures. In fact, this would be a useful
research convention for early literacy-intervention research; if such studies would use a wider
range of outcome measures, it would be possible to determine the breadth of impact that
these interventions may have. Also, given the complementary findings for the various types of
intervention, it would be helpful if researchers would undertake longitudinal studies of more
complex interventions (such as combinations of the types of efforts that have worked in the past),
making it possible to evaluate the long-term value of more ambitious and complete efforts to
develop early literacy skills.

Finally, the NELP report found few demographic differences in children’s learning patterns,
and even those that were found were confounded. Future studies of early literacy skills should
consider the possibly varied impact of early interventions, particularly on large and growing
groups of children who struggle with literacy (such as second-language learners and children
being raised in poverty). However, even if research studies are not designed to specifically answer
such questions, it would be helpful if they would report their data separately for children from
different demographic categories, as this would make it possible for future meta-analyses to make
sense of any patterns that may exist.

Conclusions
The NELP report represents a systematic and extensive synthesis of the published research
literature concerning children’s early literacy skills. It provides educators and policymakers with
important information about the early skills that are implicated in later literacy learning, as
well as information about the type of instruction that can enhance these skills. The results also
identify areas in which additional research is needed.

The meta-analyses conducted by the panel showed that a wide range of interventions had a
positive impact on children’s early literacy learning. However, these positive results were due


to the nature and intensity of the instructional activities examined in the studies. There is
now a clear need for translational research. Researchers or their agents delivered many of the
interventions; examinations of more typical implementations of such programs within early
childhood education are needed. Many of the high-impact instructional strategies involved
activities and procedures different from those typically seen in early childhood classrooms.
These interventions were usually delivered as one-on-one or small-group activities, they
occurred frequently, and they were adult-directed. Few interpretable studies evaluated the
effects of merely providing a literacy-rich or language-rich classroom environment.

Finally, there were significant problems with the quality of much of the research in this area.
Many studies used simple pretest-posttest designs, which provide no causally interpretable
evidence, and studies often did not provide evidence that these groups were equivalent prior
to an intervention or represented the same population. Often, there was evidence for group
differences that existed before the start of the intervention. The panel was unable to rely on the
data drawn from such badly designed studies, and they were excluded from all of the analyses
reported here. These flaws do not allow appropriate postintervention differences to be attributed
unambiguously to the intervention; neither do studies in which the intervention is confounded
with other important factors that could be the source of any observed effects. Ultimately,
building a larger and more comprehensive knowledge base concerning early literacy skill
development and promotion will require more high-quality research.

References
National Institute of Child Health & Human Development. (2000). Report of the National
Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research
literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. (NIH Publication No. 00-
4769). Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office.

NICHD—see National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.

West, J., Denton, K., & Germino-Hausken, E. (2000). America’s kindergartners: Findings from
the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, kindergarten class of 1998-99, fall 1998. Washington,
DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U. S. Department of Education, Office of
Educational Research and Improvement.

West, J., Denton, K., & Reaney, L. M. (2000). The kindergarten year: Findings from the Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study, kindergarten class of 1998-99. Washington, DC: National
Center for Education Statistics, U. S. Department of Education, Office of Educational
Research and Improvement.


For additional copies of this document, please contact:
National Institute for Literacy at ED Pubs
PO Box 1398
Jessup, MD 20794-1398
Phone 1-800-228-8813 Fax 301-430-1244
EdPubOrders@inet.gov
To download the document, go to the National Institute for Literacy
Web site at www.nifl.gov

This copy is provided to you at no cost by

Summary- National Reading Panel (USA)

Summary- National Reading Panel (USA)

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